Torn the Fuck Apart return with Kill. Bury. Repeat.

Torn the Fuck Apart (l-r Brandon Mitchell (bass), Michael Langner (guitar/vocals), Dylan Watt (drums). // photo credit Jeffrey Sisson

It’s been five years since Kansas City death metal band Torn the Fuck Apart’s sophomore album, A Genetic Predisposition to Violence, but this past Friday, Kill. Bury. Repeat. came out via Los Angeles label Gore House Productions. The new full length sees the band trimming down to a trio from the quartet from which we last heard, and the result is ten songs which are lean, mean, and designed to punch a hole in your head like the blast from a 12 gauge shotgun.

Unsurprisingly, the music is uncompromisingly aggressive, the lyrical content intense, and cover art suitably intimidating. Themes for songs are pulled from real-life incidents, as well, making the brutality all the more close to home. In some cases, that’s quite literal, with “Corrosive Form”–“a song about the disposal of a body through chemical reaction” is inspired by serial killer John Robinson, aka “Slavemaster.” “A Statement of Malicious Intent” takes its content from the true events of the February 28, 1997 Hollywood shootout wherein more than 2,000 rounds were fired is a gun battle between bank robbers Emil Matasareanu and Larry Phillips Jr. and the LAPD.

The hard hits aren’t just confined to the album’s content, though. Torn the Fuck Apart’s journey to releasing Kill. Bury. Repeat. was one fraught with more than its fair share of delays and issues, says guitar player and lead vocalist Michael Langner when we spoke over Zoom late one Sunday afternoon.

“We were supposed to record an EP after our tour with Origin in 2020, but well, pandemic happened,” shrugs Langner. “Then studios closed down and we were like, ‘Well, I guess we’ll write a full album and just wait.’”

As with so many other artists, the Covid pandemic put a screeching halt to everything because Torn the Fuck Apart were trying to pick up more momentum and get on some bigger tours. They had pretty good management at the time through Extreme Management Group, who represent a varied roster of heavy bands from hardcore to metal and everything in between, but ended up getting dropped as the company started shedding smaller acts. Top that off with Westport heavy music mainstay the Riot Room closing in early October 2021, and Torn the Fuck Apart was a bit adrift.

“The Riot Room, Dallas and Tim [Guschenritter], see, they would book the big shows like Aborted and stuff like that, but they would also book like the smaller bands that necessarily wouldn’t be able to fill up the Granada or something like that,” Langner explains. “It always gave other bands and local bands a better opportunity to open up and be seen more.”

Add into that the fact that, after the pandemic, every bigger band wanted to tour at the same time because they’d been sitting for two years making no money at all, so they was a flood of tours all taking place at the same time, with every slot on a four- or five-band show filled with touring acts, and thus, Torn the Fuck Apart suddenly had a lot of time on their hands. Thankfully, they used the opportunity to their advantage.

“Knowing that we had the extra time, what we were thinking was that we might as well put forth that effort,” Langer says. “We’ve got to build up our brand a little bit more. We revamped the band, sat back and looked at like, ‘So what are we good at doing? Rather than pushing the limits of our skills, playing-wise, let’s just take what we are good at and work on that.’”

That’s exactly what Torn the Fuck Apart did on Kill. Bury. Repeat. There’s no fat on these songs whatsoever. Everything is just like right where it should be, and that’s exactly the intent, says bassist and vocalist Brandon Mitchell.

“All the time we had over Covid just added to what we were able to put forth,” Mitchell offers. “We had all that time to concentrate on the music because there were no shows happening and then in the immediate aftermath of Covid when the tours started up again, like he was saying, it was oversaturated. Given all of that time we didn’t have shows obviously going on, nothing booked, that just gave us all the time that we had, band-wise, to focus on writing new music.”

Mitchell sees what they did during that time as really hammering down, refining, and trying to make their music good as they could, and it really shows through on songs like the title track and album opener “Corrosive Form.” Part of the new approach, says Langner, was that they wanted to focus on writing good songs that were catchy and got stuck in your head. That approach might sound like pop songwriting, but there’s a method to that madness, the frontman continues.

“I feel like we’re not going to be the fastest band,” Langner admits. “We’re not going to be the most technical. We don’t need like a label on it or anything like that. We just want to write a good song. So we just worked on that.”

To Langner and, it seems, his bandmates, a good song was a more important than the band sweep picking all the time with blast beats for three minutes straight, and the end result is the rare death metal album where you’re not listening to it and thinking, “Oh man, that’s a sick riff.” It’s a set of full songs, not a bunch of cool individual components on which to hone in.

A good portion of that is the vocal delivery of the lyrics, all of which were written by drummer and vocalist Dylan Watt. As Langner explains, he’d always felt that the vocals in torn the Fuck Apart had been a little cookie cutter, and very Dr. Seuss in their manner of delivery, and for this album, wanted to really hone in on good phrasing this album and catchier patterns.

“Dylan nailed it and knocked it out of the park,” says Langner effusively. Mitchell immediately agrees.

“When he was showing us vocal lines and patterns, he would just send them to us through text and we would mentally place where we think that he thinks it’s going in the song,” the bassist says. “Then he would show up for practice, he’s like, ‘No, it’s, it’s actually over here.’”

Having that entirely different mindset and approach to vocal hooks and placement of those within the riff it was so much better, the pair offer, explaining that because Watt is a drummer, he’s hitting the beat on everything.

“His hands are here, his feet’s there and there,” Langner continues. “So he does the vocals like that, too. When we write lyrics, we like to just follow what our fingers are doing. It just follows the guitar riff and I’m not thinking about doing a vocal on his cymbal hit or stuff like that placement wise. He just had a better ear for it, really.”

“We just gave him free reign,” says Mitchell. “We’re like, ‘Come up with what you got. We’ll go through it and we’ll add our two cents if we have any,’ but by and large he knocked it out of the park.”

Kill. Bury. Repeat. is available now on compact disc and cassette, as well as digitally, from Gore House Productions’ Bandcamp.